What Is A WordPress Plugin?

What is a wordpress plugin? If you don’t know the answer to this question. keep reading. Back when I started my web development business, adding a cool feature to a website was expensive and time consuming. Today, building a fully functional website with a ton of bells and whistles can be super easy and inexpensive thanks to a huge library of “Plug-ins”. If you think I’m talking about how you recharge your laptop’s battery, then you’d better read today’s #whatiswednesday.

One of the best things about having your website built on a well-known platform, such as WordPress, Joomla, Shopify (the list goes on and on), is that you have access to a library of plug-ins to choose from that will allow your site to do cool things. Even better, setting it up can be as easy as plugging in a lamp. As they say, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel, and that saying applies to code as much as anything else. There are thousands of programmers building modules that they will give you for FREE or at a cost that is just a tiny fraction of what the custom development would be. These plug-ins are pre-built for your specific website platform, and each platform will allow for these little packages of code to easily be integrated with your site, most of the time with just a few clicks of your mouse.

For example, I had a client who wanted to manage rentals of bouncy houses on his website, allowing visitors to see what bouncy house was available and be able to make a deposit for a bouncy house on a specific day. Guess what… he was on a WordPress platform so all we had to do was find a “plug-in” that did this and voilà, he had a fully functioning rental system performing on his site and it only took me a few moments to make it work. Sure the client said “what is a wordpress plugin?” It didn’t take much explaining, because I just installed his scheduler and only billed him a fraction of what it would have cost me to build it from scratch.

Let me tell you a secret… if you want your site to do something special and you’ve seen other sites do this “special” thing, there is more the likely a plug-in for it. Therefore, ASK your web developer to find a plug-in for you and don’t let him charge you an arm and a leg to create that function from scratch!